land is not now one vast sheep-pasture, and
there are no longer any sheep-shearings.

X

SPORTS AND DIVERSIONS

The Puritans of the first century of colonial life--the "true New
England men," not only of Winthrop and Bradford's time, but of the
slowly degenerating days of Cotton Mather and Judge Sewall--thought
little and cared little for any form of amusement;

"Not knowing this, that Heaven decrees
Some mirth t'adulce man's miseries."

Of them it may be said, as Froissart said of their ancestors, "They took
their pleasures sadly--after their fashion." "'Twas no time for New
England to dance," said Judge Sewall, sternly; and indeed it was not.
The struggle of planting colonies in the new, bleak land left little
time for dancing.

The sole mid-week gathering, the only regular diversion of early
colonial life, took naturally a religious and sombre cast, and was found
in the "great and Thursday lecture." "Truly the times were dull when
these things happened," for so eager were the colonists for this sober
diversion that it soon became a pious dissipation. Cotton said, in his
"Way of the Churches," in 1639, that so many lectures did damage to the
people; and the largeness of the assemblies alarmed the magistrates, who
saw persons who could ill afford the time from their work, gadding to
mid-day lectures in three or four different towns the same week. Young
people, not having acquired that safety-valve, the New England
singing-school, gladly seized these religious meetings as a pretext and
a means for enjoyable communion, and attended in such numbers that the
hospitality shown in providing food for the visiting lecture-lovers
seemed to be in danger of becoming a burdensome expense. In 1633 the
magistrates set the lecture hour at one o'clock, that lecture-goers
might eat their dinner at noon at home; and they attempted to have each
minister give but one lecture in two weeks, and planned that contiguous
towns should offer but two temptations a week. But the law-makers
overstepped the mark, and the lecture and the ministers resumed weekly
sway, which they held for a century.

Hawthorne thus described the opening hours of the colonial Lecture-day:

"The breakfast hour being passed, the inhabitants do not as usual
go to their fields or work-shops, but remain within doors or
perhaps walk the street with a grave sobriety yet a disengaged and
unburdened aspect that belongs neither to a